The concept of a building formed of a composite of foam coated with concrete or cement started over fifty years ago. The fact that such buildings are not in wide use is not because they are inferior structures to houses built from wood. Their scarcity is due to the fact that any new method of manufacturing buildings confronts the problem of proving to the various government organizations that such a house or building can meet the code requirements. This proof is not easily or inexpensively done. Further, each different design of house would be required to have a similar proof to be acceptable.
Many of the designs for foam-concrete composite buildings have not been cost effective. Other designs have not been able to span very large distances thereby severely limiting the size of their rooms.
These problems and others have been caused by the inability of the designers to analyze the strength of the composite buildings. Most conventional buildings, which have three components (structural framing, interior sheathing and exterior sheathing), fit into a simple mathematical format and can be analyzed by classical mathematical methods. Buildings using composite construction materials are complex to analyze and can not be solved classically. U.S. Pat. No. 6,721,648 explains how to analyze a composite building using Finite Element Analysis (FEA).